Isabella: The Warrior Queen

by Kirstin Downey

  Ultimately, Spain emerged as the unquestioned winner against France, ending up in control of Naples. That meant that the Spanish Empire now included the entire southern half of the peninsula of Italy. Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba became the very popular viceroy of Naples, establishing Spanish rule there so firmly that Spain would retain control of the city and surrounding provinces for the next three hundred years.

  Under the administration of the Spanish Hapsburgs, the Neapolitans would not enjoy self-government, and they would suffer from the religious intolerance that by this time was ingrained into the culture. Still, the Neapolitans were somewhat protected from incursions by pirates that were backed and supported by the Turks and, for the most part, from further assault by the French.

  More important, Spanish imperial control reduced and eventually eliminated the threat of an Ottoman invasion of the Italian peninsula, at a time when Turkish aggression was approaching its zenith in the Mediterranean. “Until the battle of Lepanto in 1571, Naples remained the bulwark of Christianity against the Turks,” writes the historian Tommaso Astarita.60

  TWENTY

  ISRAEL IN EXILE

  After the fall of Granada and the forced departure of the Jews in 1492, Jews and Muslims continued to fall victim to the Spanish sovereigns’ single-minded pursuit of Catholicism.

  Queen Isabella’s goal was not actually to expel people but rather to force everyone to convert to Christianity—both for the security of the nation and for the protection, as she saw it, of their immortal souls. But to those Muslims and Jews who were determined to maintain their own faiths, conversion was unacceptable, even unthinkable. Religious hatreds are corrosive and self-perpetuating; what happened in these years would have implications for the centuries ahead.

  Queen Isabella did not deny what she was doing. She never questioned it, and in fact, over the years, her views hardened. She believed she had done what was necessary, even while acknowledging that it had caused pain. In the 1480s, for example, some Spaniards, including the bishop of Segovia, had raised criticisms and asked Pope Innocent VIII to intervene and stop the Spanish Inquisition. She admitted to her ambassador in Rome, “I have caused great calamities and depopulated towns, provinces and kingdoms.”1 But she justified it to the pope by saying that she had done so to protect the Christian faith.

  Queen Isabella was not alone in that time and at that place in doing what she thought was to her own people’s advantage. It was a heartless age. In these years, Muslims justified cruelties to Christians, Christians justified cruelties to Muslims, and Christians and Muslims justified cruelties to Jews. Some Jews, angry at the injustices they suffered at Christian hands, became enthusiastic supporters of the Ottoman regime. Elijah Capsali, a rabbi in Venetian-controlled Crete, wrote approvingly of Turkish aggression against Christians, which he viewed as evidence of a coming spiritual cataclysm that would produce the Messiah.2 Many Jews across Europe and in the Ottoman Empire shared his view.

  Moreover, each of the three faiths focused on its own injuries without exhibiting much compassion for the woes of others. Christians mourned most for Christians, Muslims for Muslims, and Jews for Jews. Surviving accounts in which people sympathize with the problems of people from other faiths are few and far between. Spanish Christians noted the grief-stricken faces of Jews fleeing Spain but rationalized it. Merchants traveling in the Ottoman Empire noted the slave markets stocked with pitiful Christian slaves but seldom questioned whether the institution of slavery was just. It was simply another harsh fact in a hard world.

  Very soon after the Reconquest was completed, new problems arose for the Muslims of Andalusia. At the time when Granada surrendered, Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand had made several specific pledges to the Muslims. They could keep their possessions and homes, operate their mosques with freedom from interference, and maintain their customs, language, and style of dress. In short, they could continue to observe their faith without hindrance. According to Arab accounts, the surrender had been made with “tears by all present,” but the Muslims had agreed because their lives and their religious beliefs would be protected. They had had confidence that Isabella and Ferdinand would adhere to these terms, and their accounts noted that the soldier who had handled the negotiations on behalf of the sovereigns had been Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, the Great Captain, a respected figure who spoke Arabic fluently.3

  Obtaining a peaceful surrender in 1492 had, of course, saved many lives on both sides, as Queen Isabella was inalterably determined to take possession of the south of Spain. From her perspective, there was no other choice.

  Almost immediately afterward, however, Isabella began pressuring Muslims throughout the former emirate to convert, and within ten years, she and her husband had completely retracted the pledge they had made to them. In a sense it is not surprising because it was consistent with her fundamental beliefs. She thought she had a spiritual obligation, both personally and as queen, to evangelize and increase the number of Christians. She could also justify it on the basis that it was dangerous to have a large Muslim population in the south of Spain—they might welcome an Ottoman Turk invasion. But the Muslims of Granada, understandably enough, felt that they had been deceived.

  At first the conversion process relied on gentle but persistent persuasion. Queen Isabella’s confessor, the converso Hernán de Talavera, was made archbishop of Granada, and he immediately set to work to convert as many people as possible through a gradual process of education about the Christian faith. He studied Arabic and read the Koran to look for common elements that he could use to illustrate the similarities between the two faiths. It was an important post for Talavera, and a loss to Isabella, who had relied on his judgment and good sense for more than a decade. When her daughter Isabel was transferred as a hostage to Portugal at the age of eight, for example, it was Talavera who had been given oversight and responsibility for the girl.4

  Talavera’s close friend, the Count of Tendilla, was put in place as the top Castilian administrator in Andalusia. The count was Inigo López de Mendoza, nephew of Cardinal Mendoza and a scion of a family known for its thoughtful and broad-minded intellectuals. He was the man who had induced the Italian humanist Peter Martyr to move to Castile to introduce classical learning and Renaissance thought. The Count of Tendilla was respectful of the Islamic faith and the customs of the local people, but he was also committed to the work of converting everyone to Christianity.

  The two men quietly made inroads among the Muslim population, converting a significant number to Christianity and making many friends among the Muslims of Andalusia, who considered both men trustworthy. But their evangelization efforts nevertheless left many Muslims uneasy, and many reluctantly began to consider moving to North Africa to escape the pressure.

  Talavera’s move to Granada had left a vacancy in the post of confessor to the queen. To fill it, she had chosen Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros, a fierce, ascetic spiritual warrior who came from a poor family in Torrelaguna, a small town near Madrid. Isabella approved of Cisneros’s stringent religious and moral code, and his abstinence suggested his life had a higher purpose than those of people who merely enjoyed pleasures. Many faiths have a long tradition of viewing self-denial as a kind of holiness. Isabella viewed ascetics as holier than ordinary people, and she may have had some reason. Certainly a person who has renounced worldly ambitions has taken a first step toward concentration on spiritual matters, even if the resulting spiritual judgments are not necessarily sound. Moreover, as a result of his renunciation, Cisneros was certainly less likely than others to be personally corrupt; she would not need to worry that he was trying to gather worldly wealth for himself. In choosing Cisneros, she was consciously choosing a spiritual adviser who was the polar opposite of the sensual, pleasure-loving, but also more tolerant Rodrigo Borgia.

  Cardinal Pedro Mendoza died in late 1494, leaving a vacancy in the top clerical post in Castile, the archbishopric of Toledo, which he had taken over at the death of Archbishop Car
rillo. Isabella then arranged for the position to be transferred to Cisneros. It would make him the most important and powerful cleric in Spain. Cisneros at first rejected the job, preferring a monkish and solitary life, but eventually he was pressured into accepting. This was highly irritating to King Ferdinand, who had wanted his illegitimate son Alonso, the archbishop of Zaragoza, by now the father of a large and growing brood of children, to have the top religious post in Castile, as it would give him both additional wealth and additional prestige. But Isabella was adamant that Cisneros was the man for the job. He was the antithesis of the king’s son, who had demonstrated in many ways his unsuitability for a religious calling. But in choosing a spiritual zealot, she also put her kingdom on a more rigid, and less tolerant, religious path. It was clearly a conscious decision and a shift of course. Hardened by war and saddened by life, Queen Isabella was herself becoming more rigid and less tolerant.

  By the late 1490s, Cisneros decided that Talavera’s gentle persuasion was not converting Muslims quickly enough to Christianity. He asked for permission to visit and then led a group of hellfire-and-brimstone preachers to Andalusia. They introduced heavy-handed new conversion techniques that included intense preaching sessions, bribes, and threats. He began pursuing with particular intensity people of Muslim descent who had converted but seemed to him insincere in their new faith, provoking fear and anger. Some former Muslims no doubt had reason to be worried that they would fall into the hands of the Inquisition because they remained—or might be accused of remaining—Muslim at heart. But anonymous accusations could be employed in such a way that anyone could be found guilty of heresy. Many Jews who had converted to Christianity had already found that conversion did not offer protection from persecution.

  But a number of Muslims still found it expedient to convert to Christianity at this time. Some four thousand accepted baptism on a single day. It was a remarkable event. Why did so many agree to convert? For some, it was probably fairly easy because they were not particularly religious in any case. Some, exposed to Christianity for the first time, may have converted sincerely, possibly convinced by the arguments presented by Talavera and perhaps had come to fear damnation. Others probably saw the writing on the wall, that Christians were now in control and that their lives would be easier if they joined their religion. Some may have responded to bribes offered by Cisneros, who offered a free shirt to anyone willing to be baptized.

  The successful evangelization effort filled Cisneros with enthusiasm and propelled him to greater efforts. To him, it was no longer enough to attack the Islamic faith; he began an assault on Islamic culture and literature as well. In Granada in 1499, he presided over a mass burning of rare and precious handwritten, gold-embossed Arabic manuscripts. Only about three hundred tracts on medical treatments were spared from the flames. Cisneros was an erudite man himself, so his single-handed destruction of the surviving jewels of Islamic Andalusian culture was an intentional act that demonstrated flagrant contempt for Islamic learning and scholarship. It was reminiscent of the Turks mindlessly destroying the manuscripts and books of Constantinople in 1453, and it inspired the same simmering rage among Muslims that the Turkish destruction had inspired in Christians.

  Many faithful Muslims had been unsettled by the mass conversions, but this destruction by Cisneros sparked true outrage. They believed that his actions were a betrayal of the promises they had been made by the Spanish sovereigns when Granada surrendered. Violence erupted in the city. A mob descended on the place where Cisneros was living; he had to barricade himself inside for safety. One of his employees was killed. It seemed that a general uprising was going to spread.

  Pleading for peace, Archbishop Talavera and the Count of Tendilla went together to the center of the storm. They entered a large crowd of angry Muslims, at some considerable personal risk to themselves. It was seen as a gesture of goodwill. Talavera’s kindness of spirit was well known; some of the residents even asked to kiss the hem of his garment. As surety that the Moors’ concerns would be fully aired, the Count of Tendilla offered his wife and children to them as hostages while they discussed the problems that had led to the uprising. But even as tensions eased in Granada, rebellions spread through the mountainous areas surrounding the city, leading to a renewed civil war, as vicious as the last one.

  When King Ferdinand heard what Cardinal Cisneros had done, he taunted the queen for having been so foolish as to select him for his post. “So we are likely to pay dear for your archbishop, whose rashness has lost us in a few hours what we have been years in acquiring,” he was heard to tell her.5 Isabella ordered Cisneros to present himself at court, where she questioned him “in the severest terms”6 about what he had done. She may have been ambivalent about his strategy. On the other hand, she would have been pleased by the groundswell of conversions he had obtained. And the uprising gave Ferdinand and Isabella the justification they probably wanted for saying that the terms of the surrender had been broken. At the end of January 1500, King Ferdinand told the Muslims in Granada that everyone must convert to Christianity. He offered amnesty from prosecution for anyone who would accept baptism by February 25.

  Under this intense pressure, many Muslims agreed to be baptized, and this dubious method of conversion appeared to have produced some results. About fifty thousand people converted to meet the deadline.7 But Muslims who did not want to convert and did not want to leave rebelled against the edict and reached out for assistance and support from Muslims in North Africa and the Ottoman Empire. That inspired a further crackdown by the Spanish crown, who feared the prospect of a new Islamic invasion into Andalusia. A new cycle of violence erupted in different places at different times. King Ferdinand ruthlessly crushed such opposition. There were atrocities: in one town in the Alpujarras, a mountainous region near the city of Granada, Muslim women and children fled to a mosque for safety, and Spanish soldiers blew up the building.

  It was during one of these local uprisings that Alonso de Aguilar, the brother of Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, was killed. The Muslims lured Castilian troops into a ravine and slaughtered them. The Muslims rampaged through southern Spain, killing every Christian they encountered. “A vast number were killed, they did not spare anyone they met, they by no means allowed to take or keep any captive,” Peter Martyr wrote.8 In a tense parley between the Castilians and the Muslims, Ferdinand and Isabella were unwilling to compromise in any way. They gave the rebels the choice of converting to Christianity or leaving Spain. The king and queen offered to transport them to North Africa if they chose to go. From this point on, religious tolerance of any kind would be off the table.

  Many Muslims decided to depart. “They have chosen to leave their native soil and ancestral homes” to avoid giving up Islam, Peter Martyr wrote. “Their departure was not unpleasing to the Sovereigns. They say that thus by degrees the land is purged of the bad seed.”9

  But later even those who chose to convert found themselves under suspicion. The machinery of the Inquisition now turned in their direction. Much as former Jews had been questioned, persecuted, and killed for their presumed failure to completely convert, the same thing now happened to the Muslims who had converted or who claimed they had. And in fact, some people only did pretend to convert, building cellars under their homes where they taught their children the lessons of the Koran, according to the Barbary corsair Hayreddin Pasha, who transported some of them to safety in North Africa.10 Those in Spain who were found to be doing this unrepentantly were consigned to the flames by the Inquisition. Queen Isabella supported this inquiry, as she had when it had been applied to people of Jewish heritage or descent. She thought it essential to rid the kingdom of people who were not sincerely Christian, as active Muslims would undermine the faith of people who had been baptized.

  Still more Muslims, consequently, left Andalusia to move across the narrow strait to North Africa or to the Ottoman Empire. They were angry at their ejection from a place they had considered their home. Some began engaging in
piracy, rationalizing it as a just and commendable response to unfair treatment by the Spanish Christians.

  The Turks took advantage of the new interest in piracy and began offering support and encouragement for buccaneering operations. Piracy became a growing problem in the Mediterranean. Corsairs based in North Africa attacked Spanish targets, stealing their possessions, and enslaving Christians, shouting “Allah! Allah,” as they did so, according to the reminiscences of Hayreddin Pasha. In one month alone he captured and enslaved 3,800 Christians.11 His work was seen as so valuable to the Ottomans that in time they made him admiral of their fleet.

  Meanwhile, the Jews who had left Spain as a result of the expulsion order of 1492 experienced misery in other countries as well. Many had fled to Portugal, where the ruthless and opportunistic King João had permitted them entry, as long as they paid a hefty entrance tax. But it was a short-term welcome; if they stayed longer than a prescribed time, he told them, they would be enslaved.

  Many Jews nevertheless accepted King João’s terms and headed west to Portugal, where they were hit with new misfortunes almost immediately. Many were robbed as soon as they crossed the border. Nobody knows for sure how many moved there, but Christian and Jewish chronicles say the numbers were large. The refugees were packed into a string of camps just across the frontier from Castile.12 Soon these makeshift settlements were swept by disease, and whole families died, which inspired terror and fear among the Portuguese living nearby in long-established towns. They demanded that the Jews be forced to move once more.